A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  In the meantime a new crisis: another U-2 on a routine airsampling mission from Alaska to the North Pole had gone off course and was over the Soviet Union; it had already attracted the attention of Soviet fighters and was radioing Alaska for help. Would the Russians view this as a final reconnaissance in preparation for nuclear attack? What if they decided to strike first? Roger Hilsman brought the frightening news to the President. There was a moment of absolute grimness. Then Kennedy, with a brief laugh, said, “There is always some so-and-so who doesn’t get the word.’’ (The plane returned safely; but perhaps Khrushchev did interpret the flight exactly as Hilsman feared; perhaps this too, along with the invasion force massing in Florida and an unauthorized statement on Friday by the State Department press officer threatening “further action” if work continued on the bases, reinforced his determination to bring the crisis to an end.)

  Later that afternoon the Executive Committee met again. Robert Kennedy now came up with a thought of breathtaking simplicity and ingenuity: why not ignore the second Khrushchev message and reply to the first? forget Saturday and concentrate on Friday? This suggestion may, indeed, have been more relevant than anyone could have known. For, as Henry Pachter has argued,* the so-called second letter, from internal evidence, appears to have been initiated as the immediate follow-on of Khrushchev’s reply to U Thant; it began with a reference to Kennedy’s reply to U Thant on Thursday and took no note of events on Friday. Moreover, its institutional tone suggested that it was written in the Foreign Office. Might it not have been drafted in Moscow on Thursday and Friday with an eye to Saturday morning release in New York? Then the so-called first letter, which reflected the movement of events well beyond the U Thant proposal and which was clearly written by Khrushchev himself, may well have been composed late Friday night (Moscow time) and transmitted immediately to Kennedy while the ‘second’ letter was deep in the bureaucratic pipelines. Knowing heads of state and foreign office bureaucracies, one could take anything as possible.

  At any rate, on October 27 Kennedy now wrote Khrushchev, “I have read your letter of October 26th with great care and welcomed the statement of your desire to seek a prompt solution.” As soon as work stopped on the missile bases and the offensive weapons were rendered inoperable under UN supervision, Kennedy continued, he would be ready to negotiate a settlement along the lines Khrushchev had proposed. Then, in a sentence profoundly expressive of his desire to retrieve something out of crisis, he added: “If your letter signifies that you are prepared to discuss a detente affecting NATO and the Warsaw Pact, we are quite prepared to consider with our allies any useful proposals.”

  And so the message shot inscrutably into the night. Robert Kennedy carried a copy that evening to the Soviet Ambassador, saying grimly that, unless we received assurances in twenty-four hours, the United States would take military action by Tuesday. No one knew which Khrushchev letter superseded the other; no one knew whether Khrushchev was even still in power. “We all agreed in the end,” Robert Kennedy said afterward, “that if the Russians were ready to go to nuclear war over Cuba, they were ready to go to nuclear war, and that was that. So we might as well have the showdown then as six months later.” Saturday night was almost the blackest of all. Unless Khrushchev came through in a few hours, the meeting of the Executive Committee on Sunday might well face the most terrible decisions.

  Sunday, October 28, was a shining autumn day. At nine in the morning Khrushchev’s answer began to come in. By the fifth sentence it was clear that he had thrown in his hand. Work would stop on the sites; the arms “which you described as offensive” would be crated and returned to the Soviet Union; negotiations would start at the UN. Then, no doubt to placate Castro, Khrushchev asked the United States to discontinue flights over Cuba. (As for the errant U-2 which had strayed over Russia the day before, he warned that “an intruding American plane could be easily taken for a nuclear bomber, which might push us to a fateful step.”) Looking ahead, he said, “We should like to continue the exchange of views on the prohibition of atomic and thermonuclear weapons, general disarmament, and other problems relating to the relaxation of international tension.”

  It was all over, and barely in time. If word had not come that Sunday, if work had continued on the bases, the United States would have had no real choice but to take action against Cuba the next week. No one could discern what lay darkly beyond an air strike or invasion, what measures and countermeasures, actions and reactions, might have driven the hapless world to the ghastly consummation. The President saw more penetratingly into the mists and terrors of the future than anyone else. A few weeks later he said, “If we had invaded Cuba . . . I am sure the Soviets would have acted. They would have to, just as we would have to. I think there are certain compulsions on any major power.” The compulsions opened up the appalling world of inexorability. The trick was to cut the chain in time. When Kennedy received Khrushchev’s reply that golden October morning, he showed profound relief. Later he said, “This is the night to go to the theater, like Abraham Lincoln.”

  3. THE ELECTION

  The President issued immediate instructions that there should be no claiming of victory, no cheering over the Soviet retreat. That night he limited himself on nationwide television to a few unadorned words about “Chairman Khrushchev’s statesmanlike decision” and the “compelling necessity for ending the arms race and reducing world tensions.”

  The next morning he told me he was afraid that people would conclude from this experience that all we had to do in dealing with the Russians was to be tough and they would collapse. The Cuban missile crisis, he pointed out, had three distinctive features: it took place in an area where we enjoyed local conventional superiority, where Soviet national security was not directly engaged and where the Russians lacked a case which they could plausibly sustain before the world. Things would be different, he said, if the situation were one where they had the local superiority, where their national security was directly engaged and where they could convince themselves and others they were in the right. “I think there is a law of equity in these disputes,” he continued. “When one party is clearly wrong, it will eventually give way. That is what happened in the steel controversy, and that is what happened here. They had no business in putting those missiles in and lying to me about it They were in the wrong and knew it. So, when we stood firm, they had to back down. But this doesn’t mean at all that they would back down when they felt they were in the right and had vital interests involved.”

  He thought it unfortunate that this had happened in the midst of the campaign, fearing that some Republicans would feel obliged to denounce the settlement. “They will attack us on the ground that we had a chance to get rid of Castro and, instead of doing so, ended up by guaranteeing him against invasion. I am asking McNamara to give me the estimated casualties if we had attempted an invasion. [The estimate, I understood later, was 40–50,000 in the American forces.] . . . One thing this experience shows is the value of sea power and air power; an invasion would have been a mistake—a wrong use of our power. But the military are mad. They wanted to do this. It’s lucky for us that we have McNamara over there.”

  What worried Kennedy particularly was the inconceivable way each superpower had lost hold of the reality of the other: the United States absolutely persuaded that the Soviet Union would never put nuclear missiles into Cuba; the Soviet Union absolutely persuaded that it could do so and the United States would not respond. Remembering Barbara Tuchman’s enumeration in The Guns of August of the misjudgments which caused the First World War, he used to say that there should be a sequel entitled “The Missiles of October.” But he believed that rationality had triumphed; he hoped that Khrushchev’s deceit and recklessness signified some awful aberration, and that the consequence would be to end Soviet illusions about American behavior under pressure. And, indeed, the alacrity with which Khrushchev had managed his retreat suggested that Harriman may have been right in surmising that the Cuban adventure was
less his own idea than a project pressed on him by his hard-liners. Perhaps, like Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, he was now sitting in the Kremlin wondering how in the world he could ever have embarked on so crazy an undertaking. One noticed three months later that Marshal M. V. Zakharov, the army chief of staff, was transferred to a footling post in the military school system, his name quietly dropped from the forthcoming edition of the textbook On Soviet Military Science.

  “There are few higher gratifications,” Dr. Johnson once said, “than that of reflection on surmounted evils.” Kennedy was well satisfied by the performance of his government. The Executive Committee had proved a brilliant instrument of consideration and coordination. He was particularly proud of his brother, always balanced, never rattled, his eye fixed on the ultimate as well as on the immediate. McNamara, as usual, had been superb. Llewellyn Thompson had provided wise counsel; Edwin Martin had managed the Latin American side with tact and efficiency. If the President was disappointed in others, he was not, I think, especially surprised. As a whole, the government could hardly have performed better. For the rest, life went on. On Tuesday, October 30, he wrote Mrs. Paul Mellon, who had recently finished her rehabilitation of the Rose Garden, “I need not tell you that your garden has been our brightest spot in the somber surroundings of the last few days.”

  The crisis had for a moment suspended the political campaign. The President, the Vice-President and the cabinet had all canceled their speeches, and so had Truman (though the non-political Eisenhower, to Kennedy’s amusement, had kept on). It is hard to estimate the impact of the Cuba week on the election, though foreign crisis usually strengthens the administration in office. Certainly it was a rebuke to extremism on both the left and the right. The antiquarantine demonstrations by peace groups had exposed the bankruptcy of the unilateral disarmament position; and in Massachusetts Stuart Hughes, after an energetic campaign, polled less than 3 per cent of the vote against Edward Kennedy and George Lodge. In New York the new Conservative party fared little better. Four avowed John Birchers running for the House—three in California, one in Texas—were all defeated. And across the country the Democrats, surpassing any administration in a mid-term election since 1934, gained four seats (among them George McGovern) in the Senate and lost a net of only two in the House. The outcome left the internal composition of the Congress little changed, but, in light of the losses usually suffered by incumbent administrations in midterm elections, the President’s personal mandate was triumphantly refreshed. And Richard Nixon’s declaration of hatred of the press and ‘withdrawal’ from politics after losing the governorship of Cali fornia gave the White House a special fillip of entertainment.

  4. LOOSE ENDS

  But the problems of the missile crisis were far from over. In New York Stevenson and McCloy were deep in intricate negotiation. In Havana Castro, unconsulted by Khrushchev, furious over the Soviet idea that the UN should verify the dismantlement and removal of the missiles and determined to hold on to the IL-28 bombers, which he now claimed as Cuban property, was doing all he could to upset the Soviet-American settlement. The Russians themselves seemed less than forthcoming on verification and on the removal of the IL-28s. But on November 20 Khrushchev finally agreed that the IL-28s would go within thirty days, and the United States terminated the quarantine.

  Castro’s resistance, however, made it impossible to establish the UN inspection Khrushchev had proposed, and the United States therefore never completed the reciprocal pledge not to invade Cuba. Discussions dragged desultorily on till in January 1963 the United States and the Soviet Union, accepting the impossibility of resolving “all the problems which have arisen in connection with this affair,” formally removed the Cuban missile question from the Security Council. In the months to come, however, the original Khrushchev-Kennedy plan was in a sense put into effect at one remove. Instead of UN inspection, American aerial reconnaissance served as the means of verification; “the camera,” the President said in December, “. . . is actually going to be our best inspector.” The Soviet Union tacitly accepted this by instructing the Russians at the SAM sites to leave the U-2s alone. For its part, the United States, without formal commitment, refrained from invasion and, indeed, took measures in the spring of 1963 to prevent hit-and-run attacks by Cuban refugees from United States territory.

  Argument continued through the winter. Senator Keating, stimulated by his triumph of the preceding October, began a new campaign designed to shake American confidence in the settlement. His charges that the Russians had failed to dismantle concrete missile sites forced Secretary McNamara to bring photographic evidence on television to refute the allegations. Keating also said that missiles were probably being hidden in caves, though the evidence was clear that every nuclear missile known to have been brought into Cuba had been removed; and he denounced the presence of Soviet troops in Cuba, though, from the viewpoint of United States aerial reconnaissance, it was plainly better to have the SAM sites manned by Russians, politely oblivious of our overflights, than by Fidelistas. In the end, as the Soviet Union began a gradual withdrawal of its forces, this controversy subsided.

  The President helped restore perspective in March at the Gridiron Dinner, held just after Khrushchev’s son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei had paid a visit to the Holy See. “I have a very grave announcement,” the President began.

  The Soviet Union has once again recklessly embarked upon a provocative and extraordinary change in the status quo in an area which they know full well I regard as having a special and historic relationship. I refer to the deliberate and sudden deployment of Mr. Adzhubei to the Vatican.

  I am told that this plot was worked out by a group of Khrushchev’s advisers who have all been excommunicated from the Church. It is known as “EX-COM.”

  Reliable refugee reports have also informed us that hundreds of Marxist bibles have been unloaded and are being hidden in caves throughout the Vatican.

  We will now pursue the contingency plan for protecting the Vatican City which was previously prepared by the National Security Council. The plan is known as “Vat 69.”

  5. THE ATTACK ON STEVENSON

  In the meantime, another problem had arisen which for a few days created sensation and embarrassment. On December 1, 1962, the President called me over to his office and said, “You know that Charlie Bartlett and Stewart Alsop have been writing a piece on Cuba for the Saturday Evening Post. I understand that Chalmers Roberts is planning to do a story on the Alsop-Bartlett piece for the Washington Post and that he is going to present it as an attack on Adlai Stevenson. You had better warn Adlai that this is coming.” I asked what the article said. The President replied that he understood that it accused Stevenson of advocating a Caribbean Munich. He said, “Everyone will suppose that it came out of the White House because of Charlie. Will you tell Adlai that I never talked to Charlie or any other reporter about the Cuban crisis, and that this piece does not represent my views.”

  The President and Stevenson had worked harmoniously over the last eighteen months. In December 1961, when Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago had wanted Stevenson to resign from his UN assignment to run for the Senate in Illinois, Kennedy had greatly pleased Stevenson by insisting that he stay. He told Stevenson that he would feel even more frustrated as a junior Senator than he was at the UN and reminded him of Alben Barkley, who, when he returned to the Senate after his Vice-Presidency, was just another freshman at the bottom of the list. “I said we needed him in the UN,” Kennedy said to me later, “and that I counted on him to stick around.”

  There were always minor problems: Stevenson would have liked to be consulted more often on the formation of policy, though this complaint was as much against the State Department as against the White House; Kennedy wished that Stevenson would not discuss his occasional irritations with the press. But the relationship was one of mutual respect. Kennedy in particular had been much impressed by Stevenson’s UN performance during the missile crisis. Now the Saturday Evening Post story
promised trouble. Alsop and Bartlett were intelligent and responsible reporters, and Bartlett, in addition, had been for many years a personal intimate of the President’s. There was little doubt that anything they had to say would be blamed on the White House.

  Soon after my talk with the President, Clayton Fritchey called me about the article from the UN Mission in New York. As sometimes happens, the magazine’s advance publicity and its layout (a photograph of an agonized Stevenson with a caption about Munich) were worse than the text. But the paragraph on Stevenson claimed that he alone “dissented from the Executive Committee consensus.” It quoted an “unadmiring official” as saying that Stevenson wanted “a Munich,” proposed trading Guantanamo and “the Turkish, Italian and British missile bases for the Cuban bases” and would have been satisfied with “the neutralization of the Cuban missiles.” In fact, Stevenson had supported the Executive Committee consensus; though he had talked on Friday about the Turkish and Italian bases (no one apparently ever brought up British bases), so had others, and, like others, he had changed his mind on this by Sunday. Moreover, his concept of neutralization applied, not to the missiles, but to the whole island, involving the removal not only of Soviet weapons but of the troops whose presence would soon so upset Senator Keating—all this in advance of any deal on Guantanamo. On the other hand, his advocacy on Friday and Saturday of a political program, unmentioned in the Bartlett-Alsop piece, had seemed to some out of cadence with the general endorsement of the quarantine, and his persistence in contending for negotiation, even in the framework of the quarantine, had caused worry over the weekend that he might want to make premature concessions.